Image Works

Monday, 17th February, 2003

Being something of a nascent photographer, I've added up a bunch of pictures over the last couple of years. There are ways and means of dealing with them and now is the time to really start playing to get things as spot on as possible.

I have a photo gallery online already, as part of The Poe Station, deliberately created as a simplistic content based site, and viewable (except for the photo gallery, naturally) in the text browser Lynx. It's called Poe's Photo Album which name naturally took weeks of soulsearching to come up with. A new name? Answers on a postcard to the usual addy.

Anyway, it's about time I uploaded a bunch more pics and maybe organised them a little better. There are new tools now that may just do the job more efficiently and in keeping with my innovation and efficiency drive I ought to start using them.

Poe's Photo Album currently uses a piece of software called Arles Image Web Page Creator. I'm pretty happy with this package, which admittedly isn't up to date, but there a few things I'd like to do that it doesn't seem to offer me. At $49 a pop, it's a pretty cheap solution.

But what about the alternatives? Many of the newer paint packages have all of this built in as standard. ACDSee 5.0 is a quite awesome piece of software which I've thrown on tonight and already fallen in love with. I will most definitely be using this to do batch renaming, auto exposure and quick and easy rotation. However the option to create an HTML setup has very few options and is totally not up to what I need it to do. So, next!

Next would be Adobe PhotoShop 7.0, as industry standard a paint package as industry standards can go. If you want to mess around with a photo to any degree whatsoever and you can afford more than Paint Shop Pro, this is what you buy. End of story. So how does it stand up to all this cheapo software on the web gallery front? Well it holds its own but I ain't writing home to momma yet.

I've quickly thrown together a gallery for some pictures never before seen on the web (drum roll please) from last November in London. I've managed to lose a couple, temporarily, which will be restored when I put this thing properly live but in the meantime there are pics, there are pages and the thing is there to look at. Only from this link, however...

It's clean and it's efficient. It's also very easy to set up. It resizes everything nicely, thumbnails well and handles the images themselves as it should. However the navigation is pretty poor and the text just plain sucks. I can seemingly only choose from four fonts, regardless of how many I have installed within Windows, and I can't find an option to move the text around the screen. Not good enough.

That leaves the ASP script that Dan has been playing with. I'll get round to that one tomorrow. It just requires a bunch of directories to be there and handles the rest on the fly, which becomes simplicity itself but brings in a little performance hit. It may be the solution in combination with ACDSee or it may not. I'll soon find out.

In the meantime, I may just go back and buy the newest version of Arles.